1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of wireless communication, and in particular, to wireless communication methods and wireless communication devices such as an eNode B (eNB) or user equipment (UE).
2. Description of the Related Art
Machine-Type Communication (MTC) is an important revenue stream for operators and has a huge potential from the operator perspective. Based on the market and operators' requirements, one of the important requirements of MTC is improving the coverage of pieces of MTC UE. To enhance the MTC coverage, almost all of the physical channels need to be enhanced. Repetition in time domain is the main method to improve the coverage of the channels. At the receiver side, the receiver combines all the repetitions of the channel and decodes the information.
In Time Division Duplexing (TDD) not all the subframes in one frame are used for downlink (DL) or uplink (UL) transmission. According to the frame structure in LTE specification, there are DL subframes, UL subframes and special subframes in one frame. In a special subframe, it includes DwPTS, GP and UpPTS, as shown in FIG. 1 which schematically illustrates the structure of a special subframe in TDD. Downlink channel can be transmitted in DwPTS, and uplink channel can be transmitted in UpPTS.
For different special subframe configurations, the lengths of DwPTS and UpPTS are different. Take DwPTS for example, the lengths of DwPTS according to the special subframe configurations are listed in the table below (Table 1).
TABLE 1Normale cyclic prefixSpecial in downlinksubframe DwPTSconfiguration(number of OFDM symbols)0319210311412536971081196
For MTC in coverage enhancement mode, the repetitions of one channel are transmitted in multiple subframes. To fully use the downlink or uplink resource and reduce the latency, it is better to also use DwPTS or UpPTS to transmit downlink or uplink channel repetitions. As the available resources in the special subframe are different from that in the normal subframe, how to map repetition in DwPTS or UpPTS in a special subframe becomes a problem.